


why, ‘cause they all die

by beamkatanachronicles



Category: No More Heroes (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-22
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-15 09:56:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16060724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beamkatanachronicles/pseuds/beamkatanachronicles
Summary: Everyone dies, Reaper,he thinks,even you, Reaper, Reaper, that’s what people called you.





	why, ‘cause they all die

**Author's Note:**

> An illustrated version of this fic appeared in the first issue of GhM Zine (gumroad.com/ghmzine), and a much sloppier version of this appeared some years ago ON THIS VERY SITE!! before i decided to massively rework it for said zine. GHM and being able to do this rewrite both mean a lot to me, so thank you for taking the time to read. :’)

He catches himself humming her song one night.

It’s not the first time. For the last few days, for no reason at all, it’s hung on the tip of his tongue: a word he’s looking for but can’t place, a name just out of reach. But this time, he remembers. And of course it’s when it’s not even fucking _relevant,_ when all he’s doing is scrolling through foreign auctions and letting the TV drone a white noise along in the background. Travis’ finger stops mid-scroll, hovering an inch above his laptop’s track pad. Jeane, a ball of furry gray on his knee, glances curiously up at him; her little head cocks to the side before she hops off his leg and onto the floor.

 _Fuck_. He squeezes his eyes shut, his fingers rubbing his forehead.

The world outside the doors of his motel room is silent: no passing cars, no strangers moving and talking in the night. Santa Destroy, like him, had fallen idle these last few months. It was as if the city lay dormant, hibernating beneath a hard frost— with Sylvia Christel gone and the UAA with her, there were no more battles, no more spectacles. No more bodies to fell; no blood-soaked adrenaline high whose momentum he could ride in manic, ecstatic frenzy. His blood’s gone cold, now. His desire all evaporated. This city, in a three-year-long blink of an eye, had resumed its old, well-worn status quo: Santa Destroy was, once more, nowhere.

And tonight he’s hardly a Crownless King. Tonight, with two screens flickering a ghost’s glow over his face, Travis is no one.

So why remember the song now? Why, when his life has settled back into glorious _nothingness?_ Suddenly he can’t focus on setting his bid up anymore. Travis snaps his laptop shut with a resounding _click._ Around him, like a specter, stands the same shitty apartment, the same cheap furniture holding up tons of overpriced resin and plastic. Apart from his yet unrepaired window, an ugly mosaic reminder clinging precariously together under packing tape, he could easily pretend that nothing at _all_ had happened to him in these three-odd years.

The moonlight streams through his window in roughly hewn, assymetrical chunks. The packing tape is cardboard brown and opaque, but then again it was only one pane that’d broken. And then again, the last thing on his mind when he’d put the stuff up, clumsily tearing strips off the roll with his teeth to hold this goddamn window together, had been artistry: not with Bishop’s blood still tracing a dotted line along his carpet to where his paper-bagged head had lain.

Travis Touchdown exhales. It’s a full, weary breath, a whole lungful, and he blinks too much and scratches one foot with the other foot and drums his fingers on the side of his armchair. He’s thinking too much again. Thinking about dead people, thinking about things that just don’t matter anymore, names and numbers when he can’t place names and the final, heavy noise a body makes when it stumbles from human to corpse. 

The moon is bright tonight. There was a woman he killed once, one of one two three four five six seven women. _That’s got to be the street lamp, that is too fucking bright to be the moon._ She sang— _the moon, wish I could just turn that shit off_ —she sang to him and she told him to remember.

And she died on a rooftop with her spilled guts staining the lace of her skirts. 

_Everyone dies, Reaper,_ he thinks, _even you, Reaper, Reaper, that’s what people called you._

He’s been tapping out the rhythm of the tune with his fingers, he realizes, giving up, singing it under his breath, to an audience of no one in particular.


End file.
